Podcast Saturday

The SuperversiveSF Monthly Roundtable Live Chat is coming up this Saturday, November 19, at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (20:00 GMT). Your Obedient Servant has been invited to participate, and the invitation has been accepted. Watch this page, or the SuperversiveSF blog, for links to the live event.

As I understand it, recordings of previous episodes are available in podcast form. I shall ask the Persons in Charge for links.

If Yr. Obt. Svt. is unable to attend, I still urge you to listen in, as you will be hearing words of wit and wisdom from such superversive figures as John C. Wright, L. Jagi Lamplighter, and Jason Rennie of SciPhi Journal. The topic for this month: Gratitude in fiction, characters, and daily life.

Life, Carbon, and the Tao

My essai for the first anniversary of L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Superversive blog is now up in full:

Part One: What’s so special about carbon?

Part Two: What’s so special about the Tao?

Reposted on SuperversiveSF in one piece.

Go, read, and I hope you enjoy.

In other news, I shall not be writing this week, as I have finally enlisted some help to do a top-to-bottom cleaning of my flat, which is many months overdue. The accumulation of books and papers was making it impossible for me to hoover up the dust, and the dust was making it difficult to do anything else. I have been living largely on a diet of antihistamines and facial tissue. Enough of that!

Life, Carbon, and the Tao (part 1 now up)

The estimable L. Jagi Lamplighter is featuring my new essai ‘Life, Carbon, and the Tao’ on her Superversive blog. Part 1 is now up; part 2 to follow next week.

Huzzahs and bemusements

I must say, that fellow John C. Wright knows how to throw a party. He has just finished the fair draft of his latest book, The Vindication of Man, and this is how he announces the blessed event:

Unlimber the big guns, ring the church bells, release the kraken, remit all executions, free the gladiators, gather the greenskinned Orion dancing girls, decree a clone parade of endless twins, and have the Death Star blow up the peaceful and unarmed planet Alderaan in joyful celebration! Two firkins of water shall be distributed to every Fremen!

Read the rest.

In other news:

Earlier today, I received from CreateSpace my printed copy of Sci Phi Journal #2, in which Yr. Obt. Svt. has the honour to be published. It makes a lovely product on paper, with a single caveat: Somewhere in the production process, an extra blank page got added at the beginning, so that all the odd-numbered pages are on the left and even numbers on the right. I am hoping this oversight will be corrected for future printings (if that is the cromulent word for the single-copy print runs of print-on-demand books).

On her Superversive blog, L. Jagi Lamplighter conducts an excellent interview with my Honourable Number One Boss, the publisher/editor of Abyss & Apex, Wendy S. Delmater.

And over on the SuperversiveSF site (my, how that word is getting around!), Jason Rennie (who is also the publisher/editor of Sci Phi Journal) takes a well-aimed shot at the racist and sexist claptrap of K. Tempest Bradford. Yr. obt. svt. is mentioned therein, to his nearly infinite surprise.

On a personal note, tomorrow I am due to see my G.P. for the results of the tests, pictures, pokings, proddings, and siphonings that have been performed on me over the past couple of weeks, in the interest of diagnosing more accurately what is wrong with me and why I cannot concentrate well enough to get any damned work done. My apologies to those among my 3.6 Loyal Readers who have been expecting blog posts and/or fiction from me.

The Art of Courage

The lovely and talented L. Jagi Lamplighter, a.k.a. Mrs. John C. Wright, is starting a weekly series on Superversive Fiction on her blog. I have the honour of being chosen as the first guest blogger in this new series. Colour me bashful.

In this short essai, I explain the origin and intended meaning of the term ‘superversive’, particularly as it applies to fiction. I first came up with the term (in that meaning; others have used the neologism for different purposes, but it did not catch on) in a very old essay, ‘Superversive: The failure of subversion in imaginative literature’. This new piece covers some of the same ground, but with a different emphasis and a new twist in the conclusion.


 

Behold the Underminer! I am always beneath you, but nothing is beneath me!

The Incredibles

For about a hundred years now, ever since the First World War broke the confidence of Western civilization, it has been fashionable to praise subversion. Art, music, and literature, as many of the critics tell us, are not supposed to go chasing after obsolete values like truth or beauty; they are supposed to shock, to wound, to épater les bourgeois – to subvert the values of society.

Read the rest at Welcome to Arhyalon….